AlternateTake

Spanning an eclectic range of projects and with a characteristic grace and a searching tenderness, cinematographer Anand Bansal's work intimately maps out the passage of time and the shifts in families (Gamak Ghar, Gullak), as well as explores the dynamics of space and subjectivity with equal elan (The Mirror, LSD2).

The interview will be up on our page this weekend!

With just two short films, Ambiecka Pandit has cemented herself as a formidable voice. Her sophomore short, Under the Waters, is an exquisitely taut distillation of q***r adolescent desire, throbbing with erotic tension and featuring an unforgettably blazing performance from Nishant Bhavsar.

The interview will be available on our page this weekend!

Abhinav Jha delivered two of 2023's best performances in Achal Mishra's quietly affecting Dhuin and Parth Saurabh's brilliantly incisive Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar. Garnering a Critics' Choice nomination for the former, he is poised as an actor on the rise.

Stay tuned for our conversation with this superbly promising young actor.

Kabir Mehta is a film director and writer. His feature film BUDDHA. MOV, was nominated for best debut film at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. He co-directed this year's Netflix series, Class, a giddyingly exuberant, flashy and wickedly self-aware excursion into the elite circles of Delhi.

The video will be up tomorrow on our Facebook and Instagram page.

Lakshvir Saran first rose to attention with his performance in Ivan Ayr's Meel Patthar, which garnered him a critics choice nomination. Since then, he has appeared on the second season of the Prime series Unpaused and Aakash Chhabra's short film, Mintgumri, a quietly affecting snapshot of care and its attendant internal turmoil, that played at the Dharamshala International Film Festival 2022. In the recently released Netflix series The Fame Game, his performance has been singled out for considerable praise, for portraying with wrenching fragility and startling openness a young man grappling with his sexuality, consequent guilt and the burden of living a lie.

The video will be up tomorrow on our Facebook and Instagram page.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐉𝐚𝐢 𝐁𝐡𝐢𝐦

- 𝐀𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐮𝐥 𝐆𝐮𝐩𝐭𝐚

Lijomol Jose as Sengani shines through in a star-driven slyly take on the class divide, justice and politics.

It doesn’t happen very often when a film tackles issues that are plaguing our society in a very unapologetic manner that it lays bare all its cards in the very first scene and what you know, it’s just the start.

The nearly three-hour film begins with the headcount of prisoners leaving that day, being asked which caste they belong to and police separate the ones of — Koravar, Ottar and Irular tribes — possibly to be charged with some other made-up cases, while others are let go of.

Then and there the director lets you know, what we are in for even though it was just the tip of the iceberg.

The film with a genius title is based on the true incident that took place in 1993. Falsely accused in a theft case, a man named Rajankannu of the Irular tribe was tortured to death in custody and his wife came to the lawyer for help. It ended up being a landmark case in the history of Tamil Nadu state as it was habeas corpus heard in the High Court.

In an era where education about BLM (Black Lives Matter) is becoming as important as breathing and eating and in the era of ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards), Jai Bhim is a pivotal cog in the wheel of today’s reality.

Since it’s inspired by a true incident, the centre figure is taken by the former advocate and justice K Chandru, who was very active in student politics and an important member of the Left movement.

Naturally, Suriya as Chandru gets the bulk of screen time and is the saviour for Sengeni (Lijomol Jose), who gives her everything to get the truth out.

Chandru in Jai Bhim is introduced with a sequence where he is leading a protest at a police station against police brutality and asking for the arrest of one of the cops and hence justice. Chandru is presented as a hero, and from the first scene you know he will win the case and he will get the job done, the only question was how.

The subject here was the cause and the pregnant tribal woman’s fight, courage but it slowly turns into a fight of that woman led by the Good Samaritan.

When he gets a breakthrough, the background score lets us know, he is a big deal. The judges, the prosecutor, the victim everyone seems to be indebted to him from some past deed.

This was one of the big reasons why I had reservations with movies such as Pink and Article 15 wherein the former the deep baritone and towering figure of Amitabh Bachchan enters and the story becomes about him fighting the case and not the case and the latter where it is about the high-class police officer and not the three dead Dalit girls (saviour complex).

Yes, the star, the saviour is required to make the audience believe that he can do it, he is trustworthy if that person is at the helm, he will be able to get to the root of the cause and deliver justice but it almost feels like hero worship here.

The camera angles, the score takes you away from the gravity of the situation as 28 minutes before his entry, Tha Se Gnanavel is successful in showing how tribal communities are exploited and how the rich caste member treat them as untouchables.

The film is about the systematic and normalised oppression against the unprivileged. The framing, the blaming and the accusation and the brutality in custody that follows in the grab of interrogation. Jai Bhim does not just tell you how common it is, it also tells you how deep it runs and so many hierarchies it goes through without any objection.

It was easy for the minister to make a scapegoat of Rajakannu (K Manikandan), who visited his house a few days ago to catch a snake. The senior police officer is under immense pressure from the minister and it just flows through the ranks and the ones handling the case go on outright hooliganism.

The one suffering from all this is Rajakannu and his wife, with one child and another on the way. Denied basic human rights and identity, Sengeni’s dream of living in a house made of bricks, not the ones with thatched rooftops, who can’t stand an overnight rain.

The odds are stacked against her in every way and form. She is alone as Rajakannu went outstation to earn a living when the accusation is made. She pleads, yells, gets tortured till the search for her husband comes to an end.

The screenplay naturally makes you root for her and could/should have been the ideal protagonist but it wasn’t to be. It is as emotional a performance as it is physical. She roams around with her daughter Alli and the unborn child, asking for help, to let her know what is happening.

It is a gut-wrenching act because you are witness to the absolute disturbing torture which her husband, Rajakannu’s nephew and sister are going through and she is helpless. She is howling, crying and almost dies inside seeing her husband getting dragged into the station and the inhumane treatment.

Like Mythra (Vijayan), the lawyer’s role should have been restricted to helping in her rebirth, the catalyst to help her dream and believe that the monsters can be put to their place. However, the latter becomes the driving force, which is unfortunate…

Sengeni has a beautiful character arc as the story progresses, the tribal character has a supposed “mass scene” where the policemen are pleading her to sit in the jeep and not create a scene as the orders are from higher authority. She has started believing, she knows, now the ball is in her court. It’s a magnificent scene and equally well-performed.

She is vulnerable yet brave because she knows if she gives up, the atrocities are only going to line up furthermore. The anger, the pain are felt and Lijomol embodies all of that.

Sengani is the protagonist of this story, the cause and the film should have had as ultimately it is he, who wins it for her and not her win, as it should have been.

𝘾𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙞𝙖𝙡𝙞𝙨𝙢 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘾𝙪𝙡𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝘾𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙢𝙖: 𝙇𝙤𝙤𝙠𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙩 𝙑𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙪𝙫𝙚’𝙨 𝘿𝙪𝙣𝙚: 𝙋𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙊𝙣𝙚

- 𝙍𝙖𝙘𝙝𝙞𝙩 𝙍𝙖𝙟

Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune is often regarded to be a pioneering science-fiction novel of the 20th century. After a shelved attempt and a shoddy adaptation by David Lynch, Denis Villeneuve’s film finally does justice to Herbert’s massive world-building ability.

Like most stories that transcend generations to remain loved, Dune can also be read in different ways. But as its cinematic adaptation ran in front of my eyes, I found a clear, deliberate theme of colonialism that seems integral to the idea of the story. But more than that, I found the film - made in 2021 - to be catering to the colonial and not the colonized, making it a questionable film politically (at least as it stands at the end of part one).

A lot of the film is invested in exposition, and yet the narrative continues to be riddled with ideas, phrases and allegiance lines that remain confusing. To sum it in short, the story is about two beings - Atreides, who hold control over Arrakis, a desert planet that is home to the local tribe Fremen.

What interests the Atreides in Arrakis is the vegetation of a special spice in this desert-land that helps in intergalactic travel. This means that a part of Atreides population in the desert world continues to dig in search of these spices, until a creature called desert-worm is tantalized by the rhythmic sound of machines to launch an attack.

It is a classic colonial versus colonized narrative, the kind we have seen in a film like Avatar years ago. The problem, though, behind the visual extravagance, Villeneuve’s knack for bigger-than-humans storytelling, and Hans Zimmer’s fantastic score, is that the film (not going into the novel) has a protagonist who is a colonizer. Paul (Chalamet) is a white man in a country that is not his to begin with.
The narrative, in trying to be authentic to the novel, seems to forget that 1965 was still a time when the idea of white man’s burden was as ripe as the brewing thought of white man’s transformation. The latter was a more liberal idea of looking at colonialism, a more comfortable gaze than the more criticized former.

But in Dune we are given a narrative dominated by white people, and the natives - the blue-eyed Fremen - are only given a compromised screen presence. This goes deeper, of course. It is a problem with previous Villeneuve films, too. His films are quite easily on the side of the white majority, probably the reason why he is so successful.

Arrival was as much about showing China as the wrathful, impatient beast against the gentle, helpful aliens as it was about a woman - a white woman - and a white man being calm, and composed, trying to find humanity in those alien beings, a comment on how there were some “good” whites who always saw the human in the “other”.

With Dune, the theme of colonialism is too obvious, and the film’s white-centric politics too easily visible. The second part promises more of Fremen, and Paul’s transition into a life of Arrakis, but the question remains. Why? Why are we still paying service to a plot where a bland, white man is our protagonist when far more interesting characters are around? And more urgently, why can’t we tinker with perspective and choice of protagonists in adapting a work of literature? Why?

Brandon Ingram is an actor and author, based in Colombo. He has been working in theatre since 2006; 2020 marked his film debut as he played Arjie in Deepa Mehta's Funny Boy in a performance full of a gentle slow bloom. In our conversation with him, we try unpack his association with Funny Boy and diverse assortment of interests and multi field roles across the years , all fuelled and bound by his singular interest in storytelling.

The video will be up tomorrow on our Facebook and Instagram page. The podcast will also be available tomorrow on all major podcast streaming platforms!

Rehan Mudannayake is a Sri Lankan actor and director who made his mark as the charismatic and charming Shehan in Deepa Mehta's 2020 film Funny Boy. His suave, insouciantly confident presence in the film happens to be his first acting gig. He talks to us about preparation, reception, key touch points the film sparks , the peripheral conversation, influences, and contemporary Sri Lankan cinema.

The video will be up tomorrow on our Facebook and Instagram page. The podcast will also be available tomorrow on all major podcast streaming platforms!

WE ARE BACK!

Bhaskar Hazarika is a screenwriter and filmmaker. Exploring various facets of motherhood and starring Seema Biswas and Adil Hussain among others, his debut feature Kothanodi (2015) drew from a compendium of Assamese folk tales while his second Aamis (2019), a Tribeca selection, is an entrancing tale of forbidden impulses. Originally a MovieSaints release, Aamis is also now on Sony Liv.

The video will be up tomorrow on our Facebook and Instagram page. The podcast will also be available tomorrow on all major podcast streaming platforms!

Be it 1956 Central Travancore, a fable on the oral tradition of storytelling that takes otherworldly leaps, or both Santhoshathinte Onnam Rahasyam and Everything is Cinema which strip bare latent tensions within relationships, Don Palathara's cinema resists easy categorisation. His films have travelled to Moscow and Rotterdam and are presently streaming on Mubi. We chatted with him about his three most recent films, tracing the themes, development and techniques in them.

The interview will be out tomorrow on our Facebook, Instagram and Spotify pages.

(We are temporarily back from our hiatus.)

We had to temporarily interrupt our hiatus to talk loud about Soni director Ivan Ayr's exquisite second film Meel Partner (Milestone), streaming on Netflix, whose finely calibrated emotion and melancholy washes over the viewer hauntingly. We were joined by Lakshvir Saran, who plays the young intern , Paash, to the protagonist Ghalib (Suvinder Vicky); he talked about finding the rhythm and truth in his craft at detail.

Lakshvir Saran will next be seen in the upcoming Netflix series, Finding Anamika, co starring with Madhuri Dixit Nene, Suhasini Mulay, Sanjay Kapoor.

The interview will be out tomorrow evening on our Facebook , Instagram and Spotify pages.

𝘼 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙛𝙡𝙪𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙩 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙚𝙧𝙇𝘼𝙉𝘿 2021!

- Debanjan Dhar

From March-end, Goa will be animated with the hustle and bustle of some of the smartest, savviest produceorial creative minds in showbiz, thanks to the forthcoming ProducerLAND 2021(Learning and Network Development Program). This is a sui generis programme for South Asian producers that has been developed by India-based producer Celine Loop, along with international festival and sales strategist Tanja Meissner and French producer Marc Irmer. The programme is the first endeavor, admirable in its scale and ambition, of the Storiculture Company, which believes in 'Native for Global' outlook as it's mantra. The company is dedicated to fostering a network of film and content expertise and strives to burgeon South Asian stories and talent in the international market waters. Celine Loop, who has been involved with producing a string of Q's films (Gandu, Tasher Desh, Brahman Naman ) and who has been a sheer force behind independent international filmmaking for a decade, co founded Storiculture last year.

In a telephonic chat with Shreya Rawat, who's working with the media company based out of Goa, she enumerates the carefully mapped out process by which Storiculture designed ProducerLAND The company began thinking in terms of the subjects they wished to encompass and in terms of the journey a producer undertakes, from content development to IP exploration to working with writers/directors, legal framework to co production to raising finances to scheduling to sales and finally distribution and PR. They thought of experts who specialize in each respective field, conducted rigorous research on their available options, and proceeded to reach out to invite the guest faculty which is now a 40-odd eclectic, vibrant mix of producers, casting director, script and sales experts, legal consultants and significant studio bigwigs. The program has been in gestation since November 2020. Notable guest faculty include Guneet Monga, Nandini Shrikent among others.

Therefore, the programme becomes a confluence of creatives with diverse interests, converging in one space to rub shoulders with the other and perform an expectedly fascinating cross weave of learnings.

Structured as a 4-month learning and exposure programme, ProducerLAND will kick off with a 2 week residency in Goa, from March 22 onwards. This particular module will traverse the gamut of a project from early stages of development to marketing and release. There will be minute case studies of films (Rawat discloses examples like Rohena Gera's film Sir, Rubaiyat Hossain's Made in Bangladesh) series ( Sameer Nair , CEO of Applause Entertainment, will take a masterclass on Scam 1992),with an eye to global insight, audience affinity, pitch and Go-to-Market strategies, and achieving the best of post production. The highlighted masterclasses range from Bahubaali producer Shobu Yarlagadda's session on big scale production and challenges of multimodal IP exploitation, and Aditi Anand's ( of Little Red Car Films) talk on budgeting and financing. Vijay Venkataraman, director of post production at Netflix India, will take a masterclass as well.

The second and third modules will be online. The second, to be held in April, will provide participants customized mentorship opportunities, from areas of specialisation such as content development for episodic series, non fiction production and multi modal storytelling. In June, the third will require participants to deliver a project pitch to industry pundits.

The program will welcome 15 selected applicants residing in or from India,Pakistan,Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Myanmar, and is mostly intent on applicants with some prior producing credits, albeit it encourages arrant newbies too , contingent on their degree of active curiosity into producing that will be tested in selection process. Applications close on 15th February. Selected participants will also receive alumni access to international buyers, first look opportunities at projects, other workshops and seminars.

Shreya insists the program will also try to incorporate those who have been long term professionals in other fields (cinematographers, editors, et all) and are considering a career switch to producing; ProducerLand will serve as a fine launchpad for them too and will help them navigate their way around it.

Essentially, the program seeks to incubate and amplify rooted, stubbornly and purely local South Asian narratives, cultivate a consolidated community of talent, offer them a global edge and try pe***ng them at a broader market arena. The strategy and purpose is to disseminate these stories beyond the limited diaspora audiences, exporting them and tapping bigger markets and building artistic bridges which reaffirm our profoundly connected human experience and subjective truth that transcends geographical boundaries.

The landscape for telling and representing South Asian stories in global forums need to be more expansive, multicultural and open, and ProducerLAND is a decisive step in widening the space for such stories beyond the obligatory legroom that's usually reserved.

See you again later this year!

𝗥𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗮𝗱 𝗞𝗶 𝗧𝗲𝗵𝗿𝘃𝗶 𝗿𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 - 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗱𝘀𝘁 𝗴𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗳, 𝗹𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗵𝘂𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗿.

- Anshul Gupta

Seema Pahwa’s directorial debut lays stress on the members in the family and what family really means at the time of the death of its patriarch

After days of giving some heartwarming performances and spending years in the industry across different mediums and formats of cinema and art of storytelling, the outstanding Seema Pahwa, finally gets to lay her hands on the Director’s chair and let dictate the terms rather than being dictated, for once.

And she tackles death and the pain it leaves on the one who was staying with the person who has gone, what happens to her, who stayed 24*7 with him, by his side, taking care of him.

The film dabbles with the various emotional responses to a patriarch’s death within a family and how it makes a difference to one person, when someone else feels a dissimilar emotion regarding death.

Ramprasad Bhargava (Naseeruddin Shah), a music lover, after explaining the importance of ‘sur’ to neighbour’s kid, falls on the piano moments later. His family, which includes his six kids - four sons and two daughters - their spouses, their kids, his brother, his sister, his wife’s brother and his wife, arrive the next day. This means 20-plus principal characters in a 100-minute film can be too much. However, Pahwa handles her story well, which provides justice to every single character and makes them stand out from each other, giving them a distinctive voice.

While Mamaji (Vineet Kumar) and Jijaji (Brijendra Kala) fight over who arrived first after receiving the bad news, the kids fight over to whom he was the dearest.

The spouses gang-up against the youngest sister-in-law, who went to Bombay to become an actor, and gets taunted by comments like ‘She is an actress, will have to act like a good daughter-in-law in front of guests’, when she initiates to serve them tea.

While, Ammaji (Supriya Pathak), in one of the scenes of the film, vents out her frustration after seeing what all was happening in the house since her husband’s death, when she is discussing the decision of which son she will stay with for the rest of her life, with her younger daughter Dhaani (Sarika Singh).

While Dhaani goes on ranting about the youngest daughter-in-law Seema (Konkona Sen Sharma) and her family, Ammaji feels loneliness even though everybody was around then. “Aaj jab sab saath hain toh akelapan sa lag raha hai,” she says.

In another great scene, Rani (Anubha Fatehpura), the elder daughter vents her frustration out against her mother, when everyone including Dhaani were going gaga about her, saying she didn’t let her do anything, complete her studies and married her off at the age of 16.

And, finally in one of the many funny scenes, Ramprasad’s wheel-chaired sister (Late Pushpa Joshi) and english-speaking elder brother (Rajendra Gupta) indulge in a banter involving laddoos about who will join their brother in heaven first.

This is the story of people, who we might have seen in our families, might have shared spaces, exchanged conversations with, might even have lived with some of them. The everyday-ness of the conversations, the milieu, the house the Bhargavas live in, it all feels familiar, lived-in and even though I as an audience haven’t seen or lived in that particular house, I could recognize those cramped spaces, the neighbourhood, where the hormonal grandson, Rahul (Vikrant Massey) finds a companion for himself for those few days, yes that kind of friend.

Through. Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi Pahwa also touches upon the need and importance of family. Why does one need a family, or need to have one? Most people give an answer that they are one’s old-age investment, their kids and their families, their companions will help them to complete the circle, i.e., life, a bit easier. But what happens when just the two remain, and the rest of the family is not with you and they only arrive to discuss and fight about materialistic stuff, after one of them’s departure. These are some of the questions Pahwa raises in her directorial debut.

The film coasts along with saying some heavy stuff laden with excellent situational humour, which is why it doesn’t feel heavy or preachy at any point, and we are talking about life and death here. Pahwa keeps the tone somber and having one of the best ensembles in probably the recent few years of hindi cinema at her disposal, the film breezes through its runtime.

However, the only problem apart from a little scattered climax, I felt was that the greed of having some of the best actors in our country in one film lured Pahwa into getting all of them together, but she didn’t lay emphasis on their age.

Her real life husband, Manoj Pahwa, who plays the eldest son Gajraj is two years older than Supriya Pathak in real life, who plays the mother of those six children. That was the only thing that took the film and its viewers away from its otherwise real setting.

When the suspension of disbelief starts to creep in films like these, the viewers can sometimes get thrown off-guard, but Pahwa’s belief in the story and what she wanted to say through it helps you to sit through it, without much effort apart from going to a theatre in times like these.

Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi is playing in cinemas